“Yes, but it creates jobs!” has long been the last refuge for scoundrels promoting expensive boondoggles, so it is no surprise that it is now being used to justify continued spending on the California high-speed rail project. The most recent release from the California High Speed Rail Authority says that they now expect the project to cost up to $128 billion, but that’s okay, because it is putting 10,000 people to work.
That argument might carry some weight if we had a high unemployment rate. But right now, the United States is suffering from a major labor shortage. Each person working on the California rail line is one less person helping to move goods to markets, build homes, and so other essential work. One more strike against high-speed rail: it contributes to the increasing costs of everything.
The other justification for throwing billions of good dollars after bad is that it will save people money in the long run. “Based on a 2019 study updated for inflation, equivalent highway and airport capacity expansion would cost in a range of $130 billion to $215 billion relative to the high-speed rail cost range of $88.5 billion to $127.9 billion for Phase I San Francisco to Los Angeles/Anaheim,” says the release.
This is just another lie. There’s a real simple way of dealing with increased numbers of air travelers without spending billions on new airports: use bigger planes. Los Angeles has five commercial airports; San Francisco has three (four if you count Santa Rose). There’s plenty of room at these airports to meet the demand equal to the number of people who might otherwise ride high-speed trains.
Speaking of that number, the rail authority is backing off on its hugely overestimated number of people who are going to ride the train. As recently as 2019, it was projecting 38.6 million riders a year; now it is projecting 31.3 million. The agency doesn’t expect to complete the line until 2040, so it has 17 more years to steadily reduce the projections. That way, when ridership falls well short of the original projections, it will be able to claim “We beat our [latest] projections” or (more likely) “we fell only X percent short of our [latest] projections.”
I once said that light rail should be renamed lie rail because everything proponents say about it is a lie. The same is true for high-speed lies rail.
Putting 10,000 people to work to spend 128 Billion dollars, that’s a mere 4% of California’s GDP….which typically employs 60,000 plus.
Second the problem with your BIGGER planes argument doesn’t take into account operations. Bigger planes use more fuel, cost more tonrun and if the airports don’t own them would have to buy or rent them. If they buy em… and air travel dips again say…2nd pandemic or 9/11…airlines will be left with leviathan they can’t sell. That’s why Boeing has terminated the 747. The majestic queen of the sky is dead. 777 is a good plane and in coach majority configuration can carry 400 plus passengers. Both these planes are somewhat difficult to load in conventional airports. The A380 had the same issue….Airbus sunk money into development..major airports like O’Hare, JFK, LaGuardia, and Heathrow couldn’t expand to accommodate more planes so the idea would have been increasing capacity by increasing the size of the plane. Then came 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis; passenger counts plummeted, airlines defaulted and plane orders declined. Airbus put it resources into a plane that couldn’t sell very well. Where as Boeing’s 747-8 is simply stretch limo-ing a plane that already exists, stretching the fuselage by 20 feet and decreasing the weight and new more efficient engines. The A380 is a matter of too little too late.
The problem with California high speed rail is as most projects, cost estimates fluctuate by political regime changes. When HSR was whored by then governor Jerry Brown. We knew he wanted a legacy…his father also a governor built much states new roads and water projects. When initial price tag went from 25 Billion to 100 billion…he knew it was sinking…. so he converted it to work with freight and commuter rail existing track…. this “blended” system decreased the price to 66-76 billion. But real question is, Why did the project price Quadruple? Because the rail contractor said so….take word for it.
I remember a story where nuclear engineers showed set of blue prints for inner workings of steam workings of a nuclear power plant. The contractor and subsequent sub contractors gave them a price estimate for work involved…
Then a year later different engineers from the same firm pretend to be a different firm,
They had stripped the design down, reducing valves, pipes and welds 25% and presented their data…. contractor charged 50% more…. for what would been less work.
Ask why a train costs 128 billion dollars….
A) because we can
B) because…why not
C) because…who’s gonna check our numbers
Assuming their numbers are real, 10,000 jobs from $128 billion spent means $12,800,000.00 per job.
Even the worst “make job” programs out of D.C. do better than that.
JohnCar,
To be fair, they haven’t spent $128 billion yet. They’ve probably spent close to $20 billion.
a) JAL and ANA flew 747s on their Osaka – Tokyo shuttle service back in teh 1980s.
b) you don’t have to add A380s + 747-800s to increase capacity
For example, currently Sky West has several SFO-LAX flights ( flying for Alaska ) that they use a regional jet to fly, teh Embraer 175. It looks to have 76 seats.
If there was a demand for more seats, Alaska Airlines could swap that plane out for a larger one. One of Alaska’s new 737-max airplanes have 178 seats.
That’s 102 more seats.
A simple swap of a plane and you’ve increased the capacity by what? 130% or so?
Delta flies it’s own A319s on that SFO – LAX. That planes carries something like 122 passengers. If Delta swaps out that A319 for an A320, they’ll be able to carry an additional 55 passengers.
And that’s just SFO – LAX. Start looking at those other airports and the schedule skews strongly to regional jets. Plenty of opportunity for major capacity increases on all these flights.
And if there really was a need for capacity, an aircraft like Boeing’s Dreamliner with seating for 300 can be employed. ANA employs it on several _short_ domestic flights in Japan.
Air Europa has a few flights a day between Barcelona and Madrid for which they fly a dreamliner.
Fancy that, the vaunted Barca – Madrid route….. all that HSR and it still supports 30 flights a day, including wide bodies.